He was surveilled by the FBI for over 40 years. His books were publicly burned. He received death threats. He was even barred from serving in his own country’s military. His crime? Simply writing a novel about poor people and making his readers feel empathy for them.

Today we’re going to tell you about a writer we absolutely love here at NovaFuture. One of those we consider true monuments of literature. So we figured it was worth introducing you to him if you don’t know him yet. And even reintroducing you if you already do. Especially if you’re European, because strangely enough he remains pretty obscure on this side of the Atlantic.

We’re talking about none other than the towering John Steinbeck. An American born in 1902 and who died in 1968. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. And yet, despite his international fame, his own country spent decades trying to silence him. His story is fascinating because it’s not just about literature. It’s about power, censorship, political repression, and what actually happens when someone dares to tell the truth about a country that would rather keep it hidden. You’ll see that this man’s journey sheds light on something essential about America, both past and present. Something that Hollywood’s soft power and Netflix series have been working overtime to conceal since forever.

Because with the MAGA crowd in power, everyone seems shocked, wondering whether the US somehow turned fascist overnight. Steinbeck’s story proves exactly the opposite. Because this country supposedly blessed by some hypothetical god has always treated as enemies those who dared to show its true face. The MAGA crowd didn’t invent anything. They just took the mask off.

A writer forged by the street, not by books

John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, a small agricultural town in California nestled in a fertile valley just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. His mother, a schoolteacher, instilled in him a love of reading and writing from a very young age. His father, who ran a small flour mill, eventually went bankrupt. And that experience of falling from grace left a deep mark on the young Steinbeck. It gave him a raw sensitivity toward people who lose everything. Toward those the system grinds up without even noticing. But it wasn’t in libraries that Steinbeck learned how to tell stories about the world.

He went on to enroll at Stanford University, but he didn’t stick around for long. He went back and forth between lecture halls and fields, working as a farm laborer or ranch hand across California. These odd jobs brought him into contact with the migrant workers streaming into the Salinas Valley. It was there, rubbing shoulders with these men and women nobody ever looked at, that he found his future material. As a result, he never finished his degree.

In 1925, he tried his luck in New York as a freelance writer. It was a total flop. Then he headed back to California completely broke and settled into an isolated cottage by the sea. From there, he wrote. He struggled too. He published several books that went completely unnoticed. And for nearly ten years, nobody cared about what he had to say.

But in 1935, one of his novels, a lighthearted tale called Tortilla Flat, finally caught on. But Steinbeck had no intention of becoming a public entertainer. What interested him was the fate of the people at the bottom, the invisible ones, the ones the American Dream had left on the side of the road. That’s probably what drove him to hang out with union organizers and spend time with the strikers from the canneries and farms. At the same time, he had become friends with left-wing activists like the writer Lincoln Steffens and the sculptor Francis Whitaker. It was his first wife, Carol, who pulled him even deeper into the radical circles of 1930s California.

In short, you get the picture. Steinbeck wasn’t some armchair intellectual theorizing about poverty from a comfortable desk. He was a guy who had slept in migrant camps, shared their meals, and seen with his own eyes what America was putting its most vulnerable people through. And it was precisely that credibility that was going to make him dangerous in the eyes of the powerful.

The Grapes of Wrath: the book that shook America to its core

Before publishing the book that would change his life, Steinbeck had already laid the groundwork for what made him unique. In 1936, he had released In Dubious Battle, a strike novel that told, from the inside, the story of California’s farmworkers battling the big landowners. The following year, Of Mice and Men brought him wider recognition with its heartbreaking story of two itinerant workers bound by an extraordinary friendship in a world that had no room for them. Steinbeck could write about ordinary people like nobody else at the time. But the best was yet to come.

To prepare his great work, he had accepted a commission from the San Francisco News, which sent him to investigate the migrant worker camps in California’s Central Valley. This series of seven articles, published under the title The Harvest Gypsies, allowed him to document appalling living conditions. He met entire families who had lost everything, driven out of Oklahoma and the Great Plains by drought, dust storms, and bankruptcy. These people were starving on the roadsides of California while the big agribusiness owners got rich off their backs. Steinbeck came back both shattered and furious. He wrote in his journal at the time: “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this.”

It was from this righteous anger that The Grapes of Wrath was born, published in April 1939. The novel tells the odyssey of the Joad family, Oklahoma farmers forced to hit the road for California with nothing but a beat-up truck and the hope of a better life. But what they find when they get there is the opposite of the American Dream. Exploitation, destitution, contempt, and organized violence by those who own the land against those who work it.

The success was immediate and massive! The book sold 430,000 copies in just a few months and became the number one bestseller of 1939. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and Eleanor Roosevelt herself publicly defended it in her daily column. In 1940, John Ford turned it into an unforgettable film with Henry Fonda in the role of Tom Joad. And the musician Woody Guthrie, a complete unknown at the time, was discovered at a benefit concert for farmworkers inspired by the novel. He went on to record his album Dust Bowl Ballads, which made him famous.

But what makes this book truly exceptional is that it didn’t just move people emotionally. It changed things in the real world. The Grapes of Wrath triggered congressional hearings on the living conditions of migrant workers and directly led to the passage of new laws to protect them. The Library of Congress considers it today one of the very few novels in American history to have actually produced legislative change. And it was precisely because this book had such an impact that the powerful decided to go after its author.

The wrecking machine kicked into gear

The backlash from the capitalists didn’t take long. Within the first weeks following the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, a full-blown campaign of destruction was organized against Steinbeck and his book.

The first low blow came from California, courtesy of Kern County. And that’s no coincidence, because it’s precisely in that county that the Joad family ends up at the end of the novel. The big landowners in the area felt personally targeted, and they were right to. So in August 1939, the county board of supervisors voted four to one to outright ban the book from every library and every school in the county. The resolution had been introduced by a certain Stanley Abel, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, at the direct request of the Associated Farmers, a powerful consortium of large landowners who fiercely fought any form of unionization.

But the ban wasn’t enough for them! Bill Camp, a cotton magnate who ran the Associated Farmers at the local level, wanted to make a statement. So he organized a book burning in the center of Bakersfield in front of photographers. And for the occasion, he recruited one of his own workers, a certain Clell Pruett, to set the book on fire. And here’s the best part: Pruett had never read The Grapes of Wrath. He had just heard a radio show about it and it had made him angry. Years later, when a journalist finally got him to read the novel, Pruett said he had no regrets. The photo of this book burning was published in Look magazine and went nationwide.

Unfortunately, this outrage wasn’t limited to California. In East St. Louis, Illinois, five out of nine members of the public library board voted to burn the three copies of the book they owned. The vote was eventually overturned because of the national scandal it caused. But the damage was done! The book was also banned from libraries in Kansas City, Buffalo, Anniston, Alabama, and several other cities across the country.

The affair even made it all the way to the United States Congress. Oklahoma Representative Lyle Boren took the floor in front of his colleagues to denounce the novel in staggeringly violent terms. His words were entered into the Congressional Record for posterity: “I rise to say to my colleagues and to all honest readers of America that the painting Steinbeck made in his book is a lie, a damnable lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.” Just let that sink in!

Faced with this tidal wave of hatred, Steinbeck didn’t bend, but he was deeply shaken. The Associated Farmers had launched a systematic smear campaign against him, through the press and word of mouth. Steinbeck summed up the situation in a letter with chilling clarity:

“The Associated Farmers have launched a hysterical personal attack on me, in the press and through a whispering campaign. I’m a Jew, a pervert, a drunk, a dope fiend.”

He received mountains of hate mail and death threats. He wrote to his literary agent that his enemies probably wouldn’t kill him, but that they would destroy him. He stopped going out alone and took security precautions on the advice of people “who knew the ropes,” in his own words. He even went so far as to pass along certain compromising information to the FBI as a life insurance policy in case he had “an accident.”

“People always do evil when they are too happy.” Steinbeck knew what he was talking about.

The Kern County librarian, a courageous woman named Gretchen Knief, fought to get the ban lifted at the risk of losing her job. She wrote to the supervisors a letter that has since become famous, in which she said: “It is a vicious and dangerous thing to begin banning books. Ideas don’t die because a book is forbidden reading.” The ban was finally lifted in January 1941, a year and a half after it was voted in. And in a rather pathetic twist, those who had imposed it claimed they had only banned the book to give it publicity and help Steinbeck spread his message.

The FBI, or the fine art of surveilling an innocent writer for 40 years

If the hate campaign from the landowners and politicians had been violent, it was in some ways predictable. Rich people going after someone who exposes their practices is as old as time! But what happened next to Steinbeck was on a whole different level. Because this time, it was the state itself that went into motion against him. And not just any branch of the state: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, run with an iron fist by the fearsome J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover was a singular figure in American history. Appointed FBI director in 1935, he had developed over the years a full-blown obsession with anything that looked even remotely like communism, socialism, or even just sympathy toward workers. With the secret blessing of President Roosevelt, who had given him carte blanche for domestic surveillance, Hoover had woven a vast net of domestic intelligence. And Steinbeck checked every box that made him suspect in the FBI chief’s eyes. He had German roots. He associated with union people. The communist press had praised his books. And above all, he had written a novel that made poor people want to revolt. That was more than enough to consider him an enemy.

Starting in the early 1940s, the FBI opened a file on Steinbeck and never closed it again. Federal agents intercepted his mail, tracked his movements all the way to his trips to the Mexican border, meticulously documented his associations, and catalogued his subscriptions to newspapers deemed subversive. The fact that his second wife had once registered to vote as a communist was carefully logged in the file. Even his personal friendships were recorded and analyzed.

But the lowest blow came in 1942, right after the United States entered the war. Steinbeck, a sincere patriot, wanted to enlist and applied for an officer’s commission. The field agent in charge of evaluating him concluded that the writer possessed all the honesty, loyalty, and integrity required to serve in the armed forces. But this favorable recommendation was flatly overridden by military intelligence, which was under Hoover’s direct influence. John Steinbeck, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of the most widely read novel in America, was denied the right to serve his own country. Not because he was unfit, but because he had written a book that bothered the powerful.

Steinbeck knew perfectly well what was going on. He could feel the agents on his tail and he’d had enough. In 1942, he sent a letter to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Hoover’s direct superior, in which he didn’t mince words:

“Do you suppose you could ask Edgar’s boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I’m an enemy alien. It’s getting old.”

Hoover’s response to Biddle was a masterpiece of bureaucratic hypocrisy: “I wish to advise you that Steinbeck is not and has never been the subject of an investigation by this Bureau. His letter is returned herewith.” It was a barefaced lie, as declassified documents proved decades later, after Steinbeck’s death. The FBI had indeed maintained a file on him, thick and detailed, spanning years of surveillance.

And Hoover didn’t stop there! FBI files show that agents continued to comb through every new Steinbeck book looking for signs of disloyalty toward the government. They even went so far as to write internal literary reviews of his novels! When Steinbeck published The Winter of Our Discontent in 1961, FBI agents analyzed how the characters of Bureau-trained law enforcement officers were portrayed in the book. You’d almost laugh if it weren’t so chilling.

This surveillance lasted over forty years, until the writer’s death in 1968. And throughout that entire period, the FBI officially denied ever having investigated him. It was only after the archives were declassified that the world discovered the full scope of this institutional harassment. Steinbeck had been right all along. He had been spied on, prevented from serving his country, and had every last one of his writings and movements scrutinized. All because he had the nerve to write the truth about what America was doing to its own citizens.

When Stalin tripped over The Grapes of Wrath

And since we’re talking about regimes that had trouble with this book, you absolutely have to hear this story because it’s just too good: In 1940, John Ford had adapted The Grapes of Wrath for the big screen with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. The film had been a smash hit in the United States. It had even won two Oscars and been nominated for five more. But on the other side of the Iron Curtain, someone else had noticed this film too. And that someone was none other than Joseph Stalin himself!

In 1948, at the very dawn of the Cold War, Stalin had what he thought was a stroke of genius. He authorized the screening of the film in Soviet cinemas, figuring that this story of an American family reduced to poverty by a merciless capitalist system would make for fantastic anti-American propaganda. On paper, it was bulletproof… An American film showing the ravages of capitalism, screened with the Kremlin’s blessing to prove to the Soviet people that the West was nothing but exploitation and suffering. What could possibly go wrong? Nothing, you’d think.

Except it didn’t go as planned at all. Soviet audiences didn’t walk out of the theaters outraged at the Joads’ plight. They walked out stunned! Because what they took away from the film wasn’t this family’s misery. It was simply the fact that even the poorest Americans could afford a car. An automobile! An object that was an absolute luxury for an ordinary Soviet citizen under Stalin’s regime. While the USSR was presenting itself as the workers’ and peasants’ paradise, here was a film supposed to expose the horrors of capitalism that inadvertently revealed the staggering gap in living standards between the two countries. So the film was quietly pulled from theaters. Deemed too dangerous!

This story reveals something profound about The Grapes of Wrath and about Steinbeck in general. This book bothered absolutely everyone because it told the truth. And it’s a well-established fact that the truth has never picked a side. Too radical for the America of the big landowners. Too revealing for Stalin’s USSR. Banned in the West for showing the misery of workers. Banned in the East for showing that even that misery was enviable compared to what a thoroughly corrupted form of communism was offering its own citizens. In the end, Steinbeck had pulled off the feat of getting censored by both superpowers on the planet at the same time. Which says a lot about the power of what he had written.

Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize, or the revenge of the cursed writer

After the fiery years that followed the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck never stopped writing. He published Cannery Row in 1945, The Pearl in 1947, and of course his sprawling family saga East of Eden in 1952. A novel that was also adapted for the screen with a certain James Dean in the lead role. In 1947, he had traveled to the Soviet Union with photographer Robert Capa for a piece of reporting that only further fueled the paranoia of Hoover and his agents. And in 1962, he had published Travels with Charley, the touching account of a road trip across America with his poodle, as if trying to find the pulse of a country he didn’t quite recognize anymore.

It was that same year, 1962, that the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” After decades of surveillance, censorship, defamation, and threats, the man America had treated as a domestic enemy was receiving the highest literary distinction in the world. The irony is enough to make you think that some forms of revenge are truly worth savoring.

But Steinbeck didn’t savor it all that much. The Academy’s choice was contested, including in Sweden where a newspaper called it “one of the Academy’s greatest blunders.” And when a journalist asked him if he thought he deserved the prize, Steinbeck answered with disarming honesty: “Frankly, no.” He confided to a college friend that he had rewritten his acceptance speech about twenty times, that all his attempts at diplomacy sounded fake, and that one evening he finally got fed up and just wrote exactly what he thought: “I don’t know if it’s any good, but at least it’s me.”

And it was definitely him! His Stockholm speech, delivered on December 10, 1962, has gone down in history as one of the most powerful ever given at a Nobel ceremony. In the thick of the Cold War, while the world lived under the permanent threat of nuclear annihilation, Steinbeck spoke about the writer’s role as a guardian of human conscience. He reminded the audience that literature had not been invented by “a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches” but had been born from humanity’s deepest need. And then he dropped these words that still echo today:

“The free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.”

Two years later, in 1964, Steinbeck received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The writer whose mail the FBI had intercepted, whose military service had been refused, and whose books had been thrown into the fire was now receiving the highest honors from the very nation that had persecuted him. If that isn’t American hypocrisy in its purest form, we don’t know what is.

Nobody’s perfect: Steinbeck had his dark side too

We could stop right here and leave you with the portrait of a flawless hero who defended the downtrodden until his dying breath. But that’s not how we do things at NovaFuture. If we admire Steinbeck for the depth of his work, we also owe you the truth about his darker chapters. And we’re bringing them up because they are far from trivial.

Let’s start with the hardest part to swallow. In 1967, at 65 years old, Steinbeck went to Vietnam as a reporter for Newsday. And there, the man who had devoted his life to defending the oppressed threw his full support behind America’s dirty war. Without nuance and without the slightest critical distance. He produced glowing, uncritical reports about the military in which American soldiers were depicted as liberating heroes. Both of his sons were serving there, and he even went to visit one of them on the front line, where he was allowed to man a machine gun post during the night while the platoon members slept. He then went so far as to dismiss the antiwar protesters as “shrill wailers.” The New York Post called him out at the time for betraying his humanist past. And the American left, which had championed him for thirty years, turned its back on him.

It wasn’t the first time the left had dropped him, either. As early as 1948, a group of socialist women in Rome had publicly condemned him for switching to the camp of war and anti-Marxism. In 1955, the Daily Worker, an American communist newspaper, had criticized the way he portrayed the left in his writings. And Steinbeck himself had ended up declaring that socialism is just another form of religion and therefore an illusion. When you know where he came from, that statement really stings.

Then there’s the Israel question. During a visit there, Steinbeck had described the country as “an incredible texture of human endurance and inflexibility of the will.” His biographer Jay Parini pointed out the cruel irony of this blind admiration by writing: “The Steinbeck of thirty years ago would surely have sniffed out the injustice.” The man who had denounced the dispossession of Oklahoma farmers didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, the dispossession of a million Palestinians.

And then there’s the story of Sanora Babb, an Oklahoma journalist who had spent years documenting the lives of migrant workers in California’s camps. Her detailed notes were allegedly passed on to Steinbeck by their shared editor at Random House. When The Grapes of Wrath exploded onto bookshelves, Babb’s editor simply cancelled the publication of her own novel on the same subject. She had to wait until 2004 to finally publish it. She was 97 years old. Steinbeck never mentioned her or thanked her.

But this shift didn’t happen overnight. It was gradual, fueled by increasingly close ties with the American Democratic establishment. Steinbeck had become friends with Adlai Stevenson, the liberal candidate twice defeated by Eisenhower, and then he grew close to John F. Kennedy, who had charmed him with his image as a young, cultured, progressive president. After Kennedy’s assassination, it was with Lyndon Johnson that Steinbeck forged the strongest bonds. Johnson invited him to the White House, consulted him, and flattered him. In 1964, it was Johnson himself who presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Steinbeck, the writer the FBI had hounded for decades, let himself be intoxicated by this long-awaited recognition. He finally felt accepted by his own country. The problem is that in return, this country was asking him to look the other way on its worst atrocities. And he did.

So how do you explain all this? How does a guy who slept in migrant camps and received death threats for telling the truth end up defending an imperialist war and dining at the White House without it bothering him? The answer is both simple and terrible: Steinbeck got swallowed by the system!

In his later years, he was constantly rubbing elbows with the Democratic power structure and letting himself be charmed by politicians who knew how to play the progressive card while waging wars on the other side of the world. The poor, unknown Steinbeck of the 1930s was now living in New York in the thick of the establishment. The slow creep of comfort and privilege had done its work, slowly but surely.

And we should be honest about one more thing. The seed of martial patriotism had been there from the start, long before Vietnam. Steinbeck was never a pacifist. During World War II, for example, he had written Bombs Away, a propaganda piece for the U.S. Army Air Forces. He had also penned The Moon Is Down, a novel about the Norwegian resistance that served as an Allied propaganda tool. And when the FBI denied him his officer’s commission, he fought to get press credentials as a war correspondent and shipped out to cover the European front in 1943. His anger was above all social, not antimilitarist. He was against the exploitation of the poor by the rich, but he had nothing against war itself.

In the 1930s and 1940s, that still worked because the enemy was fascism and Roosevelt embodied the New Deal. Patriotism and social conscience pointed in the same direction. But when the Cold War upended everything, when the enemy became communism and the Democrats plunged into the Vietnam adventure, Steinbeck couldn’t tell the difference between loving his country and submitting to power. The poison of blind patriotism eventually got to him.

That’s probably the bitterest lesson of this whole story. America had tried to destroy Steinbeck through censorship, surveillance, and death threats. It had failed. So it did something far more effective. It co-opted him. It seduced him. It absorbed him. And the writer who had once made the powerful tremble ended up sitting at their table.

Obviously, none of this takes anything away from his immense talent as a writer or the power of his great novels. The Grapes of Wrath remains an absolute masterpiece, and the story of his persecution remains damning testimony about the true nature of American power. But knowing that even Steinbeck ended up getting swallowed by the machine proves just how dangerous this system is. Not only because it’s brutal when it feels threatened. But because it’s terrifyingly seductive when it decides to open its arms and pull you over to the dark side. So let’s remember that every time some media fraud tries to pass themselves off as a progressive. That’s another reason it’s worth knowing the life and work of Steinbeck. Because it speaks to all of us, to our dreams, our ideals, and all our contradictions.

Conclusion: What if Steinbeck had been European?

Let’s wrap up this portrait with a very simple question that speaks volumes. What would have happened if John Ernst Steinbeck had been born in France, Germany, or Spain instead of California? The answer is obvious. He would never have been hassled like that.

When Émile Zola published Germinal in 1885, a novel depicting the misery of miners in northern France with at least as much brutality as The Grapes of Wrath, nobody sent the FBI after him! Nobody burned his book in a public square. Nobody denied him the right to serve his country. On the contrary, Zola became a national figure. A true monument of French literature. When he took up the defense of Captain Dreyfus with his famous “J’accuse,” he was indeed convicted by the courts. But the Republic eventually vindicated him and France put him in the Panthéon.

Victor Hugo spent nineteen years in exile for opposing Napoleon III. But when he returned to France, a million people attended his funeral. Charles Dickens described the misery of London’s slums in terms just as raw as Steinbeck’s, and Victorian England turned him into a national hero.

In Europe, a writer who denounces the injustices of his time ends up in school textbooks with his name engraved on street signs. In America, they burn his books, have him surveilled by the political police for forty years, prevent him from wearing his own country’s uniform, and drag him through the mud in Congress. And when none of that is enough to shut him up, they quietly co-opt him by inviting him to dinner at the White House until he forgets what he was fighting for.

That’s the real face of America! Not the one from romantic comedies set in Manhattan or the grandiose speeches about freedom and democracy. The face of a country that since its founding has treated as a domestic enemy anyone who dares to show the reality of its inequalities. A country where writing a novel about poor people and actually getting your readers to care is considered a subversive act.

The MAGA crowd didn’t invent anything. And really, what could they possibly invent besides hatred and the rejection of intelligence? Book burnings, political surveillance of artists, the persecution of those who think differently… all of that existed long before Donald Trump. Steinbeck paid the price for it nearly a century ago. And thousands of others before and after him paid the price too. What the MAGA crowd did was simply stop pretending none of this existed by openly owning up to being enemies of anything remotely progressive.

Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, in New York. He was 66 years old. He was buried in Salinas, in the town where he was born and that his own neighbors had long refused to forgive him for making famous for all the wrong reasons. The Salinas public library didn’t even agree to put his books on its shelves until the 1990s. Yes, you read that right: The 1990s!

Today, a national museum bears his name in that very town. The surrounding streets are named after his characters. And The Grapes of Wrath is studied in every university in the country. For how much longer? That’s the question.

I took a huge amount of pleasure and time writing this piece. If you found it informative and you’d like to see more from NovaFuture, please take a few seconds to buy us a coffee. NovaFuture is a 100% independent site that unfortunately can’t survive without the generosity of its readers. And thanks in advance for taking a few more seconds to share this content as widely as you can around you. To take it further, if you’d like to have an in-depth conversation about this topic, I invite you to do so on this NovaFlow rather than on microblogging platforms that aren’t built for that. See you very soon for more culture pieces on NovaFuture. I’ve got more sizzling topics on the stove 🙂